Fresh-water shortages and more droughts and floods will increase the
likelihood that water will be used as a weapon between states or to
further terrorist aims in key strategic areas, including the Middle
East, South Asia and North Africa, a U.S. intelligence assessment
released Thursday said.

Although “water-related state conflict” is unlikely in the next 10
years, the assessment said, continued shortages after that might
begin to affect U.S. national security interests.

The assessment is drawn from a classified National Intelligence
Estimate distributed to policymakers in October. Although the
unclassified version does not mention problems in specific countries,
it describes “strategically important water basins” tied to rivers in
several regions. These include the Nile, which runs through 10
countries in central and northeastern Africa before traveling through
Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea; the Tigris-Euphrates in Turkey,
Syria and Iraq; the Jordan, long the subject of dispute among Israel,
Jordan and the Palestinians; and the Indus, whose catchment area
includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.

“As water problems become more acute, the likelihood . . . is that
states will use them as leverage,” said a senior U.S. intelligence
official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. As the
midpoint of the century nears, he said, there is an increasing
likelihood that water will be “potentially used as a weapon, where
one state denies access to another.”

“Because terrorists are looking for high-visibility structures to
attack,” the official said, “water infrastructure” could become a
target.

Release of the assessment coincides with Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton’s scheduled announcement of a new public-private
program to use U.S. knowledge and leverage to help find “solutions to
global water accessibility challenges, especially in the developing
world,” a State Department release said.

The assessment was compiled by the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, with contributions from the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the CIA and other agencies. It assumed, as a starting point,
that there would be “no big breakthroughs” in water technology over
the next decade and that countries would continue their present water
policies.

In the first of five “key judgments,” it found that water problems
would continue to exacerbate existing instability around the
world. “We don’t see water problems by themselves causing state
failure,” the intelligence official said, “but in combination with
other issues,” including poverty, the environment and “bad
leadership . . . water could tip over the edge into social
disruptions, which leads to political disruptions and ultimately to
state failure.”

The assessment noted that 70 percent of all fresh-water supplies are
now used for agriculture. “The downside,” the official said, is that
many regions are “pulling water out of aquifers faster than it is
being renewed, or out of fossil aquifers we don’t estimate will ever
be renewed. When it is is gone, the agriculture . . . will also leave.”

Based on climate-change assumptions for the next 40 years, the
assessment anticipated “more droughts, more extreme weather events”
and floods, along with concerns that “states would not make the
necessary infrastructure investments to deal with” the shifting
climate, the official said.